God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Order of the Hospital of St John (the Hospitallers) and the Templars, the two Levantine military orders, especially the latter, had established themselves as unique institutions within the Catholic church, combining charity with violence, religious vocation with fighting. Through attracting recruits and grants of property in the west, these orders established on a permanent footing the basic idealism of penitential warfare, a mechanism for its expression and a physical presence throughout Christendom reminding the faithful of the plight of the Holy Land.³⁰

The Order of the Hospital of St John, the Hospitallers, originated in an Amalfitan hospital established in Jerusalem by 1080 to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims. Originally dedicated to St John the Almsgiver, a seventh-century patriarch, after the conquest of 1099 its enhanced role and importance in coping with the new rush of western visitors, many ill, exhausted and impoverished, led to an elevation in status and patron saint, the local historical cleric giving way to the much grander, universally recognized John the Baptist. Receiving grants of property from King Baldwin, in 1113 the order acquired papal recognition as a charitable confraternity bound together into an order through the adoption of religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in outline little different from other new orders such as the Augustinian canons. While the structure of the Hospitaller order may have provided the model for the Templars, the martial function of the latter influenced the Order of St John. While never losing its essential charitable hospital function, by 1126 Hospitaller brothers were serving in the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem on campaign against Damascus, and by 1136 the order was being entrusted with garrisoning frontier fortresses.

The original function of the Templars was military yet, like the Hospital, its purpose derived from the needs of Jerusalem pilgrims. In 1119, a group of knights in Jerusalem led by Hugh de Payns from Champagne and a Picard, Godfrey of St Omer, established a confraternity to protect the pilgrim routes from the coast to Jerusalem and from there to Jericho. Licensed by the patriarch of Jerusalem and bound by the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the knights received official ecclesiastical recognition at the Council of Nablus in January 1120. From its earliest days, although dependent on alms even for clothing, the order was lodged in and around the royal palace at the al-Aqsa mosque and elsewhere on the Temple platform, inspiring the name of the Order of Temple of Solomon (which the Franks identified with the al-Aqsa) and demonstrating the strong and consistent support of the king. The same year, their contacts were sufficiently illustrious to recruit the visiting Count Fulk of Anjou into their ranks, if only temporarily; on his return to the west Fulk endowed the order with an annual income of thirty livres anjou, setting an example followed by many.³¹ Between 1127 and 1129, Hugh de Payns toured western Europe to attract donations and members, as well as assisting in negotiations to persuade his former confrater Fulk of Anjou to return east and recruiting forces for a new campaign against Damascus. Travelling widely in France and visiting England and Scotland, Hugh’s success is reflected in the extensive grants made to the order in 1127–8 of land, rents, customs, war materials and, from the counts of Flanders, the proceeds from entry fines to fiefs, known as reliefs. Hugh’s contacts included some of the greatest lords in France. Apart from Fulk of Anjou, Hugh of Troyes was already a member of the order, and other patrons included William Clito and Thierry of Alsace, successively counts of Flanders, and Theobald count of Blois, while his welcome in England and Scotland testified to his status.³² His triumphal progress was crowned at the Council of Troyes in January 1129, presided over by a papal legate and attended by many from the elite ecclesiastical establishment, including the most influential of all, Bernard abbot of Clairvaux, who a few years later was to compose the famous paean of praise for the new knighthood and holy war on behalf of the new order, De Laude novae militiae. At Troyes, after hearing Hugh’s description of the principles and practices of the new order, the council confirmed its foundation and provided a systematic Rule.

Although the Templars had received property in the west before 1128–9, Hugh’s trip consolidated the order’s standing as a recipient of charitable donations. By 1150, it had become an extensive and wealthy landowner from England to Italy and Portugal, and especially in northern France, Languedoc and north Spain, the extensive network of estates soon organized into regional commanderies. In some areas, the connection between crusading families and patronage of the order is obvious. In England, the Temple’s chief patrons proved to be King Stephen, son of the coward of Antioch, Stephen of Blois, and his wife Queen Matilda, daughter of Eustace of Boulogne and niece of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I. King Stephen’s brother Theobald and William Clito of Flanders, son of the crusader Robert of Normandy, also proved generous donors. In such concrete ways, the propaganda of St Bernard and the enthusiasm of individual recruits were lent physical expression and support, the great centres of the Temples in Paris or London, or the estates such as Temple Cowley or Knightsbridge in England acting as familiar reminders of the cause of Christianity in the east.

The clear association of the Templars with the tradition of the First Crusade found reinforcement in their enjoyment of full remission of sins for fighting and the adoption of the red cross on their white robes, showing them unmistakably as knights of Christ. However, the concept of members of a religious order, fortified by the offices of the church, riding out to shed blood could still jar, especially as other religious, such as monks, were actively discouraged from participation in holy wars. To some observers, not otherwise hostile to holy war, the vocational combination of a knight and a monk appeared monstrous. Guigo, abbot of the austere Grande Chartreuse (1109– 36), expressed anxiety at the dangers inherent in this fusion of the spiritual and profane: ‘It is useless attacking external enemies if we do not first conquer those within ourselves… first purge our souls of vices, then the lands from the barbarians’.³³ Such unease provoked lengthy apologia in support of the Templars by their adherents and supporters, most famously and polemically in St Bernard’s De Laude. Yet, despite such honed rhetoric, the active encouragement of the great and a series of papal bulls granting recognition and extensive ecclesiastical and spiritual privileges (1139–45), doubts persisted, never entirely stilled until the order’s suppression and abolition in the early fourteenth century. While in the early days of the order, the conceptual novelty disturbed some, even in the thirteenth century canonists such as Thomas Aquinas needed to spell out the meritorious connection between fighting God’s war and a penitential vocation.³⁴

Nonetheless the Templars and the Hospitallers, whose continued charitable function deflected criticisms, provided a model quickly copied elsewhere. Proliferation of religious confraternities was a prominent feature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some designed for military purposes, such as Alfonso I of Aragon’s militia at Monreal del Campo (1128–30) and the confraternity of Belchite (1122), which some have argued imitated Muslim ribats in combining military service and a life of prayer, or the Danish confraternity established in 1151–2 by Vetheman, a wealthy merchant from Roskilde, to police the seas against pirates, often pagan; while not specifically connected with penitential warfare, members took Communion and confessed their sins before each tour of duty.³⁵ Not all these brotherhoods imposed service or commitment for life: even the Templars admitted temporary members visiting Jerusalem, such as Count Fulk in 1120 or the Burgundian Humbert III the Old, lord of Beaujeu, in 1142, and provided an elite hotel service for other grandees such as Conrad III in 1148.³⁶

The success of the formula pioneered in the east by the Temple and Hospital in attracting donations and organizing men, money, defence and political control of whole regions encouraged emulation in the Iberian peninsular, where local military orders were established in the struggle against the Moors: in Castile the Orders of Calatrava (1164) and Alcantara (1176); in Leon the Order of Santiago (1170); and in Portugal the Order of Avis (c.1176). In Outremer, the Order of Lazarus, founded in the 1130s mainly but not exclusively for leprous knights, possessed close ties with the Templars. Leprosy, or similar-appearing skin diseases, were indigenous to the Near East, carrying with them a social stigma and religious charge far beyond their infectious potential (which was and is small). The association with St Lazarus became widespread in Latin Christendom, leper hospitals being known as ‘lazar houses’. The Templar rule became the model for the Order of Teutonic Knights (1198, based on a hospitaller confraternity formed at the siege of Acre in 1190) which in turn gave its statutes to the English Order of St Thomas of Acre (founded for canons 1190/1; militarized 1228). Such institutions closely shadowed mission and warfare on Christendom’s frontiers, as with the Swordbrothers of Livonia (c.1202) and the Prussian Knights of Dobrin (Dobryzn, c.1220). The larger orders, especially the Temple and Hospital, grew into international organizations, with extensive property and political influence, comprising structures, membership and dependants far beyond the original knights, priests or hospitallers, or the sergeants and other necessary military personnel: there were even convents of nuns attached to the Hospitallers in the thirteenth century.

The military orders formed just one aspect of the great revival and extension of institutional religious life in the twelfth century. What rendered them distinctive was their function and their inspiration, the war of the cross. However, those who joined the orders as the small elite of professed knights, sometimes, especially in the early